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

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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 relations underwriting the neocolonial relationship between U.S. citizens and Mexican laborers as socially unjust. But Denning has associated the injustice 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. Each emergent disciplinary formation has produced a discourse about the film which claims a knowledge that the film’s previous interpreters either would not claim or could not know. For example, Homi Bhabha derived the force of his reading of the film from the representation of Heath’s narrative as a complicitous reconciliation with the neocolonial relations that emerged at the U.S./Mexican border. But in restoring the history of political resistance to the structure of neocolonial relations, Denning has opened his analysis to questions that Bhabha’s ahistorical framework could not accommodate. In producing these incompatible knowledges, each of these disciplinary formations has materialized a site of dislocation between the state and its citizens that the film has represented in the relations between national cultures at the Mexican/U.S. border. By way of the transferential anxieties that it gathered around this site, Touch of Evil has actively solicited from these emergent disciplinary formations the desire to extract and thereafter find the terms that would “do justice” to the subaltern knowledges—colonial discourse and borderlands discourse respectively—that their predecessor 80 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency

formations were predicated on forgetting. Touch of Evil has thereafter oscil- lated in status between an object of disciplinary knowledge within film studies and and as the object-cause for these alternative ways of imagining the relations between knowledge and power. The impasses and quandaries into which these accounts of Touch of Evil have eventuated would tend to ratify what has become the conventional wis- dom concerning the film noir; namely, that film noir emplots within its narrative the ideological contradictions and social antagonisms intrinsic to the U.S. social order. But in film noir, the desire to resolve these contradictions through the solution of a crime, as would happen, say, in a classic Hollywood detective film, gives way to the recognition of the film noir hero’s ineluctable complicity in the crimes and actions under investigation. The double indem- nity of film noir heroes—their indebtedness to antagonistic arrangements of the social order—is disclosed through their participation in overlapping but noncomparable realms and the impossibility of their resolution. The defining feature of film noir entails its capacity to draw out of the film genre from which it emerges—the detective film, the cowboy western, the sci-fi thriller—an element which cannot be accommodated by that genre’s conventions. This feature in part explains why the analysis of noir films has proven so hospitable to the emergence and transformation of the academic disciplines. Film noir facilitates a knowledge that the system of representations it inhabits either cannot acknowledge or must disavow as the precondition for its coherence.12

S TATE H YBRIDITY, THE R ACIST U NCONSCIOUS, AND THE S TRANGE C ASE OF C ITIZEN V ARGAS

Having proposed the central role played by the logic of the transference in the history of the film’s academic reception, I should make it clear that it is not my intention to inaugurate yet another disciplinary formation out of the knowledge that borderlands discourse might have foreclosed. Instead, I want to bring into critical focus a character within the film who has been the unchallenged beneficiary of the anxious transferences underwriting the history of the film’s reception. In leaving his motives and actions unexamined, Donald E. Pease ● 81

each of these readings has positioned Miguel Vargas as the “subject who is supposed to know” what a previous understanding of the film had either dis- owned or foreclosed. When they are attributed to Miguel Vargas, the disciplinary knowledges produced within these fields significantly enrich Vargas’s investigative procedures and contribute additional dimensions to Vargas’s understanding of his complex relationship with Susan. As the subject within the film through whom these formerly disavowed knowledges has been articulated, Vargas would appear to have already assigned each of these knowledges separate tasks: the critique of juridical norms produced within borderlands discourse enables him to bring Hank Quinlan to justice; the culturally hybridized site from which he accomplishes this purpose puts into place a multi-racial sexual imaginary that undermines the U.S. system of monocultural representations and solidifies his relationship with Susan. Orson Welles certainly adapted knowledges about hybridity and the borderlands to his production of Touch of Evil. But in constructing his noir hero by way of Charlton Heston’s efforts at brown-face self-presentation, Welles also underscored the historically specific social and political conditions that prevailed at the moment of the film’s production—what Julian Murphet has described as its racial unconscious—that is somewhat anomalous to Bhabha’s and Denning’s descriptions of these phenomena. Murphet locates the historical origins of film noir in the aftermath of the Second World War, when, Murphet remarks, anxious white men introjected images of racialized otherness that had become the defining force in urban culture, in order thereafter to expel racial markedness from the field of visibility altogether. “Black everyday urban life is necessarily ‘seen,’ and seen to be a spreading, threatening tis- sue of systematic deprivations and counter-cultural affirmations,” Murphet explains; “it is then repressed from view as it contradicts national mytholo- gies of democracy; the existential qualities of the ‘scene’ are nevertheless retained and harnessed by the subject of vision for his own convenience, to enhance his own authenticity and depth as an alienated social agent.”13 According to Murphet, the genre tracked the means whereby this process of introjection resulted in a white-noir hero who appropriated the economic and political suffering of a racialized Other for the purpose of drawing out of it the cultural authenticity and the political authority of an 82 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency

alienated cultural minority. When he transformed the role of the white detective that Charlton Heston was originally cast to play into the part of a Mexican attorney for which Heston was required to make himself up in brownface, Welles reproduced what Murphet has called the racial dialectics of the white-noir subject.14 But he also redirected the contradictions that this character would at once produce and enact at the controversies over immigration policies at the U.S./Mexican border in . When Heston’s white-noir character appropriated the affective dimension of political activism at the border, he did so in order to buttress the policing power he exercised there. In order to understand Welles’s rationale for representing Vargas’s relationship to the border law through a presentation of Charlton Heston in brownface, we need to examine Miguel Vargas’s divided loyalties. Miguel Vargas’s decision to become involved in Hank Quinlan’s investigation of Rudy Lennaker’s murder is the outcome of two very different concerns. He wants to manage the potentially dire consequences of this violent border incident for Mexico’s international reputation; and he wants to prove to his American bride that Mexican law will enable him “to take care of his own wife in his own country.” The bomb, which killed the wealthy real estate entrepreneur Rudy Lennaker, has frightened Susan because it also took the life of Zita, the blond sexworker whose services he had contracted for the evening. In response to his decision to interrupt their honeymoon, Susan accuses Vargas of placing his marriage to the law above his conjugal responsibilities, and she requests that he move her into a motel on the U.S. side of the border—where she will be safer. Given these different motives, Vargas’s efforts to manage this international crisis should be understood within a dual context—that of his personal relationship with Susan and that of his ofﬁcial position within the Mexican state. When he shifts the focus of public attention onto the illegality of Quinlan’s procedures, Vargas speaks as a representative of the Mexican state eager to divert international attention away from evidence of its inability to regulate its borders. But he also acts as a husband intent on disproving his wife’s belief that Mexico is unable to protect its citizenry. Donald E. Pease ● 83

Although Hank Quinlan’s prejudice against Mexicans supplies Vargas with a psychological rationale for aggressively pursuing this course of action, Vargas does not accuse Quinlan of police corruption as an expression of his solidarity with the political efforts to right the history of injustices at the border. In exposing Quinlan’s illegal policing practices on the U.S. side of the border, Vargas struggles to persuade Susan of the higher standards to which the police are held on the Mexican side of the border. While Susan was about to take up residency as Miguel Vargas’s wife in Mexico City, she has nevertheless maintained her citizenship status within the United States—whose protection of her rights reaches across the border. Vargas’s position endows him with the privilege of unimpeded access to constituencies on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border. In his ofﬁce as the chief investigator of the Pan American Narcotics Investigatory Commission (a.k.a. P.A.N.I.C.), Vargas enjoys the extraterritorial status otherwise reserved for diplomats and rulers of state. Indeed his extraterritorial privileges become the basis for Vargas’s primary relationship to his cultural hybridity. His cross-border expertise has made him a temporary member of multiple communities. As the presiding member of an international investigative body, Vargas becomes an insider and an outsider in both the United States and Mexico. He performs multiple roles in multiple contexts wherein he speaks from more than one perspective to more than one community and about more than one reality. But in his efforts to prove Quinlan guilty of planting evidence in the Sanchez case, Vargas transforms the extraterritorial position that he shares with diplomats, international observers, and rulers of state into a quite lit- erally unlocatable social space. Vargas takes up this exceptional position when he recites the standards and norms through which he declares himself empowered to regulate Hank Quinlan’s investigatory procedures. A policeman’s job “is supposed to be tough,” Vargas explains to Quinlan. “It is only easy in a police state. In any free country, a policeman is supposed to enforce the law and the law protects the guilty as well as the innocent.” At the very same moment in which he pronounces Hank Quinlan responsible to uphold the legal standards that protect the guilty as well as the innocent, however, Vargas has also hollowed out a space in which he enjoys an 84 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency

exemption from the norms and rules through which the law regulates the social order. The site Vargas produces in the act of enunciating this compelling account of the differences between the free state and a police state constitutes a third state. This state, which is more commonly known as the state of emergency, names the legal fiction whereby the governing powers in a “free state” empower themselves to use “police state” measures in order to reinstall the rule of law. When he accuses Quinlan of violating the rules he was mandated to sup- port, Vargas removes from Quinlan the right to bear this shield of protection. As the apparatus through which he would ascertain Quinlan’s guilt, Vargas’s surveillance procedures are perforce exempt from the rules and standards that he has accused Quinlan of violating. In taking up this position within the state of emergency, Vargas has granted himself the legal authority to perform the very police state tactics—planting evidence, pre- suming guilt, invasion of privacy, interrogation without benefit of counsel, denial of civil rights—of which he formerly accused Quinlan. When he enters this exceptional space wherein a higher legal standard regulates the rule of law, Heston recalls the role he played the year before as Moses in The Ten Commandments. In The Ten Commandments Cecil B. deMille constructed an analogy between Moses’ subordination of the Israelites to God’s law and the Hollywood Screen Guild’s subordination to the U.S. cultural apparatus. But in Touch of Evil, Heston invokes the law’s power to regulate the practice of its enforcement for three interconnected reasons: to secure Mexico’s borders, to override any restriction on his policing powers, and to declare Susan Vargas under the protection of Mexican rather than U.S. law. To explain how these reasons informed Welles’s decision to paint Charlton Heston in brown face, I need to turn Homi Bhabha’s observations about Miguel Vargas’s racial and sexual mixedness toward Julien Murphet’s about the white-noir subject. Homi Bhabha’s description is especially perti- nent to understanding this dimension of Welles’s film in that his account of colonial mimicry explains the process whereby Mexican migrant communities negotiated the political violence and the capitalist imperatives of both the U.S. and the Mexican states. Mimicry named the means whereby they Donald E. Pease ● 85

survived those violences through the invention and representation of different cultural alternatives. Hybridity emerged, in Bhabha’s account, as a strategy whereby colonized subjects mimicked the identity imposed upon them by the colonial authority. According to Bhabha, colonial mimicry did not merely open up a distance between the colonial subjects and the images through which the colonial authority assimilated them to its system of imposed representations (they “were the same but not quite”). Colonial mimicry opened an internal distance within the colonial authority as well. The hybrid condition effected in the colonizers and the colonized thereby reversed the effect of colonial dominance, in that the subaltern knowledge which the colonizer had disavowed “turned around” on the culturally dominant discourse, thereby dissevering it from the bases for its authority.15 But Welles’s choice of Charlton Heston to play the role of Miguel Vargas complicated Bhabha’s analysis of the political effects of mimicry. As a representative of international law, Vargas places the multiple cross-cultural personae through which he practices hybridity into the service of establishing and thereby securing the border separating the Mexican national culture from the United States. In enlisting Heston’s brown mask to consolidate Vargas’s power to instruct Hank Quinlan of the higher standard to which officers of the law were beholden, Welles, pace Bhabha, had not undermined the border law’s authority. Welles had instead disclosed the ways in which immigration law had appropriated the hybridity that had been deployed as a counterhegemonic strategy throughout the borderlands and placed it into the service of governmental rule. When he asked Heston to play his character in brownface, Welles intended to recover the unofficial histories of migrant communities’ political resistance to injustice at the border. But he then overlaid these histories with the cinematic memory of the roles that Heston had played in a series of classic Hollywood Westerns—as Buffalo Bill in the  film Pony Express; as William Clark in the Far Horizons, Universal Studio’s  rendition of the Lewis and Clark expedition; as a cattleman who led a fight with Indians and Mexicans over water rights in Big Country released the same year as Touch of Evil. These roles established Heston’s primary cinematic identity as identical 86 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency

with the figure that Bhabha described as the “cultural signifier of a pioneering male ‘American’ spirit always under threat from races and cultures.” The face of the actor Welles had browned up for Touch of Evil had become the index for the frontier mentality responsible for the history of forcible resettlements of Mexican and Indian populations and the construction of the border between the two national cultures. When he cast Heston as the official representative of the international law regulating transactions at the border, Welles had not affirmed La Frontera’s power transgressively to mimic and thereby undermine U.S. neocolonial relations with Mexico. Welles’s construction of Heston’s part instead exploited what Juliet Murphet has called the racist unconscious at the heart of the noir filmic system. 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. Charlton Heston had donned the brown mask to conceal his frontiers- man imago. But Welles exposed the frontier mentality of Heston’s film persona as the racist unconscious of the international juridical apparatus responsible for the supervision of the border laws regulative of the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Welles had resignified Heston’s character in the image of a Mexican to demonstrate how that resignification enhanced Vargas’s regulatory authority. It was precisely the lack of fit between the frontier code that Heston represented and the brownface through which he masked it that constituted Miguel Vargas’s authority over every Mexican in Los Robles. Rather than looking like Manolo Sanchez, Charlton Heston in brownface mandated how Mexicans should look before they could acquire Vargas’s lawful authority.16 Wheras hybridity under Bhabha’s description would undermine the possibility for a unity that could ground any identity, then, the law that Vargas exercises effectively collapses all that is different about Mexicans into a uni- tary image of the Other. In dissociating the law he represents from the signifier of Mexicanness that could not conform to his image, however, Vargas also dissevers his position within the social order from any residual associations with either a Mexican or an American identity. Vargas thereafter invests the processses of identification out of which he constructs his Donald E. Pease ● 87 social identity wholly into the persona through which the law exercises its emergency powers.

“OPERATION W ETBACK”/EMERGENCY S TATES: T OUCH OF E VIL

In proposing that Vargas has transposed his racial mixedness into the desire to become identical with the law’s power to regulate itself, I mean to suggest that Vargas’s primary social relationship involves his identification with those powers. The law becomes for Miguel Vargas the meta-social process through which all others are produced as Other, as well as the locus for his personal desires. In his desire to destroy the civil identity of Hank Quinlan and in his desire to transform Susan Vargas into a ward of the Mexican state, Miguel Vargas might be understood to have personified the law’s desire to decide upon the civil standing of persons who travel across its borders. If “noir” names what cannot be integrated within a film’s narrative, then the noir aspect of Touch of Evil should be understood to have emerged when the emergency powers of the law that Miguel Vargas personifies become indistinguishable from the forms of illegal violence to which he has taken exception. After the controversies concerning the legality of the state of emergency that the U.S. government declared to empower its mass deportation of migrant laborers in the four years before Welles began work on the picture, however, that deportation policy comprised a more compelling loca- tion for the film’s political unconscious than does the Sleepy Lagoon Case, as Michael Denning has contended, or the spectres of the cold war, as more recent commentators have argued.17 Welles explicitly correlated film noir conventions with this deportation policy in the film’s concluding scenes when his camera tracks separate images of men whose trans-border work requires them to become immersed in the same polluted waters separating the United States and Mexico that are reputed to leave their mark on the backs of migrants. After Welles’s camera follows Miguel Vargas wading across the river with the listening device designed to record the evidence of Hank Quinlan’s guilt, it focuses in on the image of Hank Quinlan’s immobile body floating belly up in the waters, and thereby animates a relay of visual 88 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency

connotations that articulate Welles’s depiction of the two figures involved in the production of a corrupt cop with the figure produced within the historical scenario that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) called “Operation Wetback.” In concluding with this condensed visual signifier, however, Touch of Evil has exposed the collusion between the economic, the governmental and the political realms as the agency responsible for the commission of a crime that pervades the entirety of the social order. In place of solving the Lennaker case, the film’s processes of investigating this crime have reperformed the crimes of the emergency state which constitutes the film’s historical context. With the image of Quinlan’s bloated corpse, Welles has also effaced any meaningful distinction between the political agency responsible for the production, exercise, and legitimation of “Operation Wetback” and its literal victims. Because the position from which the film’s viewers focus in on this restricted image of police corruption has emerged within a polluted environment that catastrophically involves the state in which these crimes were committed, I should briefly touch on that mise en scène now. When the INS assigned the name “wetbacks” to migrant laborers who were unable to earn a subsistence living in Mexico, they did so as a way to depict Mexican migrant laborers as still bearing the physical signs of the means of entry across the , mile border that had eluded the attention of the officials assigned responsibility for its security. These undocumented workers typically gained entry during harvest time when they were swal- lowed up by factories in agricultural fields overseen by processors of plant products and foodstuffs and compelled to live under unlivable conditions. Reducible to the imaginary physical evidence of the illegal means of entry, migrants bore the mark of the border that they were also made to personify. Lacking identification with either Mexico or the United States, the “wetback” named the state of deterritorialization effected through the unsuccessful transition from one condition to another. Marking the space where the transformation from one national identity into another identity might be understood to have repeatedly failed, the “wetback” inscribed the site of non- identity where that transformation never stopped not taking place. The classification “wetback” operated an internal exclusion that official Donald E. Pease ● 89

INS policies thereafter rendered indispensable to the construction of the nation’s borders. The “wetback” was the state’s name for a figure who was at once less than yet also more than a supplement to the national citizen. Something less in that a “wetback” signified what the civic order was lacking; something more in that the “wetback” also signified the addition of what was lacking. But in supplying what was lacking inside the national culture, the operation also constituted the nation’s outside (its borders). If the nation’s outside was formulated by way of a lack internal to the system that it supplemented, however, what was lacking inside also produced the need for an outside to contain it. To protect against the recognition of the lack within the nation, INS agents erected and defended the nation’s borders against “wetbacks” who were thereby made to become identical with what the nation was required to lack. Holding the position within the social order for what Jacques Lacan has called the stain of the Real (i.e., what cannot become integratable within the preexisting forms of the social order), the “wetback” hollowed the space where the symbolic order arrived at the limit of its mandated positions. The citizen is produced out of the subject’s active disinvestment of bodily needs. If this act of bodily sacrifice constitutes the precondition for taking up an unnmarked position of disinterested participation in the civil order, the “wetback” names the condition of the body lacking a subject to accomplish this disinvestment. Put differently, the “wetback” named the position that the social order included, but as the rigid indicator for what could not be included within it. As the placeholder for what was not identical with any of the positions within the social order, the “wetback” might be described as holding the position of the null figure that the social order was compelled to exclude in order to effect the illusion of its self-enclosure. When I proposed that Welles had transformed the image of the “wetback” into the concentrated image with which he concludes the film, I meant to claim that the image of Hank Quinlan’s corpse afloat in the polluted waters between the United States and Mexico coincides exactly with the image of the migrant laborer’s social condition. Both of these images describe husks from which all the vital energies have been depleted. Like the “wetback’s,” Quinlan’s labor-power has been extracted from his body. But 90 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency

whereas the “wetback’s” energies had become the disposable means of producing fruits and vegetables, Quinlan’s corpse was made to signify the distinction between the illegal use of violence and the rules and norms through which the law reproduced itself.18 Giorgio Agamben has analyzed the paradoxical space held by these “illegal aliens” with great precision. In Homo Sacer, Agamben describes the figure of the migrant laborer as one of the names for the figure which “could not be included in the whole of which it was a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it was already included.”19 Because they named the limit to national inclusiveness, “wetbacks” also held the place for what the social order excluded to achieve order and coherence. They thereby produced what might be described as the illusion of an enveloping border for the members of the national society who had not been excluded. As the member that the nation must exclude in order for the state to achieve coherence and unity, “wetbacks” also designated the figures that a state produced when it established a historically specific concretization of the universalizing process known as nation-formation. These paradoxical figures materialized at and as the site where the state asserted the distinction between the nation as a universal form and its historically specific particularization. As a limit internal to the nation, such figures specified the difference between nationalism as a universal modern norm and a state’s historically specific particularization of that norm.20 But the space wherein such exceptions were produced was not, as the final lurid image of Touch of Evil attests, reducible to these signifiers of the internally excluded. It also included the rules of law themselves, which by definition could not be subject to the norms they would regulate, as well as the state of emergency. A nation can be understood to enter a state of emergency when its members are subjected to the extreme conditions of a war or a natural catastrophe. During an emergency, the state’s requirement to protect the nation against a danger to its security takes precedence over its obli- gation to acquire the people’s consent for its protective measures. In , Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada linked the description of migrants as non-assimilable aliens with the emergency measures of the national security state when he charged that politically subversive agents Donald E. Pease ● 91

could be numbered among the wetbacks who illegally crossed the Rio Grande River. The connection that McCarran adduced between the influx of migrants and the threat of enemy infiltration led the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by Willaim E. Jenner of Indiana, to appoint McCarran and Senator Herman Welker of Idaho to conduct an official investigation. Although this legislation had not specifically targeted Mexicans, Senator McCarran nevertheless recommended that the McCarran-Walter Act of  be deployed to subject migrant workers to deportation and denaturalization if their leaders were found guilty of subversive activities.21 Following McCarran’s construction of this homology between Mexican laborers and state enemies, President Dwight Eisenhower authorized the INS and U.S. border patrol officially to inaugurate the encompassing project of mass deportation that required the concerted efforts of various sectors of the federal government in , , , and . Because the emergency measure placed all Mexican-Americans under suspicion of membership within its operative category, Operation Wetback provided government officials with legal warrant for various anti-democratic activities. Mexican- Americans were routinely arrested, denied due process, and sent to intern- ment camps that had been set up to detain them.22 Between July ,  and June , , , migrants were apprehended. According to the INS, at the end of July of  another , “illegals” left California. By the time Orson Welles had begun work on the production of Touch of Evil the total of deportees had risen to ,,.23

P ATRICK M C C ARRAN, MIGUEL V ARGAS AND E XTRATERRITORIAL C ITIZENSHIP

Pat McCarran’s operations affected the production of Touch of Evil in several ways. Welles deployed the political resistance to Operation Wetback that had been mounted on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border as an emo- tional surplus that he drew upon in his representation of the antagonistic relationship between Hank Quinlan and Miguel Vargas. Welles turned the growing awareness of the plight of migrant laborers into the backdrop for Vargas’s condemnation of Quinlan’s denial of Manolo Sanchez’s civil rights. 92 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency

Vargas was a percipient witness when Quinlan planted two sticks of dynamite in the apartment that Sanchez shared with Marcia Lennaker, the daughter of the murdered contractor. The dynamite used in Lennaker’s assassination specifically linked its economic and political dimensions to the growing opposition to Operation Wetback. The dynamite called attention to the usage to which Lennaker’s construction crews (composed of Mexican migrants and American ex-con- victs) had regularly put such explosives in their extraction of cheap building materials from the Mexican environment. U.S. entrepreneurs like Rudy Lennaker who owned the factories in the agricultural and construction fields in border communities like Los Robles deployed Operation Wetback to faciltate their exploitation of both the Mexican ecology and the migrant labor force. Operation Wetback enabled them to hire migrant laborers at much lower wages than unionized workers demanded and to refuse them benefits of any kind. In establishing the fact that Manolo Sanchez had worked on one of Lennaker’s construction crews on the Mexican side of the border, Welles produces a correlation between Quinlan’s denial of his civil rights and the McCarran Commission’s comparable treatment of migrant laborers. When Vargas discovers evidence that Quinlan has brought two sticks of dynamte from his turkey ranch and planted them in Sanchez’s apartment, Heston’s character draws upon the borderland communities’ righteous indignation over the injustice done to migrants. But Welles also introduces elements into this scenario that impede these projections of collective indignation. From the moment he enters the apartment that Marcia Lennaker shares with Sanchez, Vargas makes it clear that he is less interested in protecting Manolo Sanchez’s civil rights than in finding Quinlan guilty of violating them. Vargas is uncomfortable over the fact that the apartment Lennaker shares with Sanchez belongs to her and that the public perception of their interracial romance will reflect badly on his own marriage to Susan. Rather than identifying with the political cause that the Sanchez case symbolizes, or defending Sanchez’s civil rights, Vargas uses his discovery of planted evidence as the basis for producing a distinction between his social Donald E. Pease ● 93 standing and Sanchez’s. At the very moment that he accuses Quinlan of planting evidence, Vargas opens up a space within the apartment that I earlier described as the extraterritorial site where the law declares an exception. When he enters that space, Vargas produces an unsurpassable gulf between himself and Manolo Sanchez. More importantly, he gains access to the same emergency powers that enabled Pat McCarran to declare “wetbacks” a threat to the national security. After he apprises Schwartz, the state’s attorney, of his intention to investigate the legality of Hank Quinlan’s policing procedures, Vargas assumes the emergency power to take whatever means necessary to accomplish this purpose. Schwartz authorizes him to enter Quinlan’s’ private property without a warrant, to obtain access to his police files, to interrogate him without counsel, and to plant a wire to gather evidence against him. But this is not the first time Vargas has exercised these powers. When the Mexican state appointed him the head of the Pan-America Narcotics Commisssion, it granted Vargas powers comparable with those which the U.S. government had invested in Pat McCarran. Vargas’s commission and McCarran’s committee both came into existence as a result of the panic over the perceived threat that illegal substances and “illegal aliens” were reputed to pose to the public’s moral health. In , the year that Welles directed Touch of Evil, the McCarran Internal Security Committee worked closely with Mexico’s drug commission as they jointly policed the borders between the two territories. U.S. Immigration policies produced the framework that established an equivalence between the illegal substances over which the Vargas commission exercises control and the “illegal aliens” that the McCarran Committee rounded up. These policies constructed an implicit equivalence between illegal substances and illegal aliens. This equivalence proposed that the economic needs of migrant laborers be construed as indistinguishable from the bodily needs of the drug addicts who were presumed to be the consumers of the prohibited substances. When Vargas places the emergency powers that he formerly exercised to prosecute drug traffickers into the service of proving Quinlan guilty of improper policing, however, he adopts the McCarran Committee’s rationale 94 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency

as more suitable for his purposes. In characterizing Quinlan as posing a threat to the security of a Mexican citizen, Vargas also pronounces Quinlan a threat to Mexico’s national security. It is no small irony that at the time Welles played the character of Hank Quinlan, the security apparatus of the United States had assigned to Orson Welles a security rating that was comparable to Quinlan’s. As a consequence of his involvement in popular front activities like the Sleepy Lagoon case, Orson Welles was ofﬁcially classiﬁed as a potential threat to the national security.24

T HE E ROTIC L IFE OF S TATES OF E MERGENCY

Thus far I have argued that U.S. immigration policies and Mexican Drug policies supplied Touch of Evil with the organizing metaphors out of which its narrative constructed homologies associating the migrant laborer Manolo Sanchez, who is forcibly displaced from the social order, with the bad cop Hank Quinlan, whose exercise of corrupt policing practices is responsible for Sanchez’s displacement, and with the figure of the “wetback” that the national security apparatus constructed as the pretext for its generalized surveillance. By way of a conclusion, I want to explain how the spec- tacular transformation that Susan Vargas undergoes in the course of the film—from the American wife of Miguel Vargas at the film’s outset into a suspect released to his protective custody at its conclusion—adds yet another homology to this series. Before turning to that task, however, I need to state more clearly the grounds for the claim that underpins this entire series of homologies. When I correlated Vargas’s treatment of Quinlan with the McCarran Committee’s of migrant laborers, I did not propose that this linkage should be construed as having exonerated Quinlan for planting evidence in the Sanchez case. But I did want to call attention to the significant distinction between the tactics that Quinlan uses in his botched attempt to frame Sanchez and the immense state powers to which Vargas obtains access when he states his intention to gather incriminating evidence against Quinlan. When Welles draws upon the political controversies surrounding Opera- tion Wetback to obscure Vargas’s complicity with the emergency state, he Donald E. Pease ● 95

adds one more layer to Charlton Heston’s brownface mask. The crime that the film does not acknowledge involves the emergency powers that Vargas enacts in his investigation of Quinlan. Unlike Welles, Vargas does not share the gathering political sentiment directed against the injustices suffered by migrant laborers. The association of that just cause with the organized violence that Vargas puts to the task of destroying Quinlan’s reputation only constitutes an alibi for the state crimes that the film cannot acknowledge. The film spectator’s identification of these causes with Vargas’s pursuit of Quinlan occludes the fact that Vargas does not want justice, he wants to exercise unregulated state power.25 Indeed, when he represents Vargas’s investigation as a form of resistance to Quinlan’s overt racism, Welles might be described as having produced an unconscious in which the state’s racism could go undetected. Racial justice is technically impossible to obtain in a state whose juridical system is authorized by the state’s emergency powers. States of emergency derive their juridical authority through the production of exceptions; e.g., “wetbacks,” upon whom the state has inscribed racial markings. Moreover, had the film represented Vargas’s use of the state’s excessive force as a crime, it would have been required to accuse the state as the agency responsible for its commission. And no state could adjudicate a crime which the state itself was accused of having committed. The citizen-subjects of liberal states abrogate the right to bring the state to justice when they divest themselves of the legitimate use of violence and invest it in the state. The state thereafter exercises a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. Liberal doctrine represents citizens as endowed with the sovereign power that the state represents. But when it declares a state of emergency, the state’s sovereignty takes precedence over the citizen’s. It is the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of force that empowers it to declare an exception to the requirement that it obtain the sovereign citizenry’s consent before it declares a state of emergency. Citizens construe their sovereign rights protected in the last instance by the state’s power to use all the force necessary to protect its citizenry. It is the state of emergency that hails citizen-subjects into existence. And this emergency power remains dormant within the citizens it calls into 96 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency

existence. Although external to them, then, the state of emergency might be said to occupy a place within the citizen-subject that is more internal to the citizen than the citizen’s subjectivity. Although internal to them as the power understood to have inscribed the norms that citizens have internalized, this power emerges as an utterly external force when it becomes necessary for the state to protect their rights and liberties. As the power to enforce them, this emergency power underwrites all of the norms and rules which produce the normativity of the law.26 If from one perspective, the state of emergency might be construed to empower the state to restore the rule of law, from another it might be con- ceptualized as responsible for the founding of the nation-state. Understood as a reenactment of the act of sovereign violence responsible for founding the nation-state, the state’s emergency power cannot be included within the nation it rules and protects. A founding act cannot be included in the order that it founds any more than a state can be a member of itself. Because it is understood as a reenactment of the act of sovereign violence responsible for founding the nation-state, the state’s emergency power required to restore the rule of law cannot be subject to the rules that it restores. Neither can the act whereby a law is declared legal or illegal. Because they describe the activities which produce the distinction between the includable and the excludable, the state’s emergency powers become most evident in the actions the state performs at the borders. At these borders, the emergency state controls what is inside by producing an outside. As the paradoxical limit to the national territory, the place where the state emerges names what cannot be integrated or symbolized within that which it delineates. A founding act cannot be included in the order that it founds, and a state cannot be a member of itself. In restricting the law’s violence to a corrupt policing practice that might be legally named, investigated, and punished, Vargas disallows the congru- ence between the sovereign violence of the emergency state (its exemption from regulation by the laws it would enforce) and the more generalized system of surveillance and control through which that violence productively circulates. Vargas thereby renders the emergency powers he exercises the less visible through the accusation—that Hank Quinlan is alone guilty of using excessive force—which facilitates Vargas’s usage of these powers. But Donald E. Pease ● 97 the full force of the violence the state exercises over the exception becomes all too vivid in Susan Vargas’s negative transformation.27 The film’s opening scenes represent Susan as moving freely throughout the town of Los Robles, and as the active bearer of sexual desire.28 But after Vargas places her within the control of the Grandi family, the properties of mobility and freedom and desire are all tangibly removed from her character. Having been dislocated from the position she previously occupied in the symbolic order, Susan Vargas is reduced to the role of a stake in the rivalrous relations among Joe Grandi, Hank Quinlan, and Miguel Vargas. In between their worlds but belonging to no world of her own, Susan Vargas is reduced to the placeholder for all the positions from which she has been excluded.29 The change in the status of the Vargas’s relationship becomes most evident when Miguel Vargas travels to the Grandi Casa Grande desperately in search of Susan. Along the way to the casino, Vargas passes directly under Susan who is standing, wearing only the sheet in which the Grandi gang have draped her, screaming for help on the fire escape of a hotel for transients. When she sees Vargas’s open convertible pass under the hotel, she calls out “Mike’s” name. But unlike everyone else in the crowd gathered on the street, Vargas does not look up at Susan. Instead he drives past her and directly to the Grandi Casa Grande. Upon his arrival at Casa Grande, Vargas demands “Where is my wife? What have you done with my wife?” In lieu of waiting for a response, Vargas announces “I am not a cop now. I’m a husband,” and begins to hurl Grandi family members against the walls and to break up the casino’s furniture. In stating that he is not a cop but a husband now, Vargas has explicitly excepted himself from the rules that would prohibit a police officer from the use of violence. He produces this exception from within the extraterritorial space he has brought into the bar with him. The position from which he enunciates the statement is identical with neither the position of the cop nor of the husband. The “I” who is being taken up first as a cop and then as a husband is the interpellative power of the state that mandates social positions. When Miguel Vargas declares that he is not acting like a cop now but like a husband, he is claiming the power to produce the social roles that he also enacts. Vargas thereby positions himself within the social order, but as the power which has officially mandated his position within it. 98 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency

What remains unclear is whether the emergency power that has pro- nounced this distinction intends to grant the husband access to the violence that would restore the rule of law, or the power to act outside the law altogether. In turning the cop and the husband into co-constituting positions, Vargas has rendered the husband’s right to defend his domestic property indistinguishable from the state’s power to use whatever force necessary to accomplish that goal. In any case, the violence Vargas exercises against the Grandi family has substituted a power that must necessarily violate the rule of law its exercise would also restore. Overall Miguel Vargas has conflated his subjectivity with that of the state’s structural violence. By the structural violence of the state, I would refer to the emergency power that enables the state to constitute the subject positions that it also sustains and reproduces. But the fact that the Casa Grande is first and last a house of prostitution suggests still another interpretation of Vargas’s puzzling utterances. For example, when we connect the pronouncement “I’m not a cop now. I’m a husband” with the questions “Where is my wife? What have you done with my wife?” the composite phrase might also be construed as a set of instructions for this “customer’s” very specialized object of desire. But just what might the personification of the emergency power of the state want in a “wife” that “he” has come to Casa Grande to find? Although Vargas’s instructions are potentially mind-boggling, he nevertheless gets the object of his desire after State’s Attorney Schwartz enters Casa Grande. Schwartz, who has met all of Vargas’s other emergency needs, appears at Casa Grande immediately after Vargas’s repetition of the questions: “Where is my wife? What have you done with my wife?” “Susan is in jail,” Schwartz answers—where she was taken after having been accused of murder and the use of illegal drugs, and where she looks like one of the Grandi family’s hookers the police have arrested in a drug raid. Because some confusion is possible, I need to distinguish the Susan that Vargas has found in the jailhouse from the U.S. citizen to whom he was married at the film’s outset. The Vargas who desired to alienate Susan from her position as a citizen under the protection of the U.S. government and transform her into a Mexican resident under his protection was the husband of Susan Vargas, the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia family. The Vargas Donald E. Pease ● 99

who wants the Susan who has become a criminal suspect released into his protective custody has become the personification of the emergency powers of the state. As a personification of the state’s emergency powers, Vargas stands outside the social order he would regulate. What the emergency state wants is someone who occupies the space of the exception; that is, someone like the “wetback” who is included within the social order yet remains outside the condition of belonging to a social order. But if the “wetback” holds the place of the hollowed-out body from which the emergency state has removed the vital power, Susan holds the place of the unsublimated bodily needs that the subject has disavowed in the process of becoming a citizen. And Vargas holds the place of the emergency state that enjoys the body that the citizen has sacrificed. Only the Susan who has been placed outside the condition of belonging can gratify the sexual fantasy Vargas announces in Casa Grande. After finding in Susan the objectification of this desire, Vargas can reinvest any sexual pleasure that he might have enjoyed on his honeymoon in the jouissance that attends the emergency state’s obscene enjoyment of the violation of its own rules.30 But when Vargas thereafter enjoys the violation of the law to which he has subordinated others, it is difficult to imagine the position he occupies as just a touch of evil. The relationship he now enjoys with Susan instead enacts what Kant would call radical evil.

● ● ●

I began this essay with the claim that the history of the film’s reception operated according to the logic of the transference. The observation with which I have concluded the essay—that the film represents a crime (the state’s violation of its own rules) that its viewers cannot acknowledge as a crime— might be understood as grounds for these anxious transferences. A glimpse of this unacknowledged crime might come into view, however, should we think of Miguel and Susan Vargas as restoring at the film’s conclusion the bodies and the relationship of Rudy Lennaker and Zita, whose disappear- ance had precipitated the state of emergency at the outset. 100 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency

NOTES

1. Charlton Heston traces the history of the ﬁlm’s production in In the Arena; An Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster: 1995), 146–178. On Touch of Evil’s various scripts and Welles’s transformation of the original script Badge of Evil, see John Stubbs “The Evolution of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil from Novel to Film,” in Touch of Evil,ed. Terry Comito (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 175–93. 2. Stephen Heath, “Film and System, Terms of Analysis” Screen 16, no. 1–2, (1975): 7–77, 91–113. 3. Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse” Screen 24, no. 1 (1983): 7–32. 4. In Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), a volume that he co-edited with Hector Calderon, Jose David Saldivar has gathered together numerous essays which display the pertinence of this discourse to political movements and counter-hegemonic cultures across the Americas. The Borderlands was a political formation as well as a range of spa- tial practices that interrelated multiple international as well as transnational locales. Borderlands discourse recorded the stories of the economic and political refugees who inhabited the barrios, ghettos, and resettlement reservations at and across the borders of the United States and Mexico. Upon remembering the colonial history that the ofﬁcial history of the United States had suppressed, this discourse enacted a counter-memory that could be deployed as a weapon in combatting its hegemony. 5. Stephen Heath, “Film and System, Terms of Analysis,” 49. 6. Stephen Heath, “Film and System, Terms of Analysis.” 50. 7. Stephen Heath, “Film and System, Terms of Analysis,” 93. 8. Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Literature, Politics and Theory,ed. Francis Barker et al. (London: Methuen, 1986), 153–54. I have chosen this version of Bhabha’s much reprinted essay, because in it he explicitly addresses its relationship to postcolonial studies. 9. Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” 154. 10. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Donald E. Pease ● 101

Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996). “The Sleepy Lagoon case lies behind Touch of Evil just as the Harry Bridges case lies behind The Lady from Shanghai. Obviously, there is no literal connection between the cases and the films. However . . . the framing of young Manolo Sanchez by the corrupt policeman Quinlan in Touch of Evil is a... metamorphosis of the Sleepy Lagoon case. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 401. 11. Joan Copjec, “Introduction.” Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1993), xii. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987) opposed the frontier mentality from which denizens of the borderlands wanted to be dispossessed through the political movement through which they struggled to accomplish this state of affairs. The Borderlands opened up a space that Michel Foucault has called a “heterotopia.” In remaining outside of the imperial norms of other cultural spaces, what I have called La Frontera justice permitted of their analysis, contestation, and reversal. La Frontera contested the frontier mentality most vigorously at border crossings and other sites of entry. 12. For an excellent discussion of the difficulties in defining film noir as a genre, see Michael Walker’s “Film Noir: Introduction,” in The Movie Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron (London: Studio Vista, 1992), 8–35. In the same volume, see Deborah Thomas’s “How Hollywood Deals with the Deviant Male,” 59–70, for a discussion of how film noir dramatizes points of crisis in the lives of its male protagonists, one of which is the transition from wartime to peacetime, see Richard Maltby, “The Politics of the Maladjusted Text,” 3–48. 13. Julian Murphet, “Film Noir and the Racial Unconscious,” Screen 34, no.1 (1998): 30. Manthia Diawara has argued that noir films by black directors call attention to this invisibility to heighten the sense of self-presentation “Noir by Noirs: Toward a New Realism in Black Cinema,” Shades of Noir, (London: Verso, 1993), 261–279. 14. Charlton Heston has recently recalled the part Welles played in this transformation in great detail: “His name was Vargas, we decided; the very bright son of a wealthy Mexican family on the fast track for high office in his country. None of this was either in the script or the picture, but inventing his background, we could begin to invent the man.” But Welles may have also had in mind Portabiro Vargas, the fascist dictator of Brazil whose police state tactics Welles experienced firsthand when he filmed there in 1948, when he came up with this name. In the Arena; An Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster: 1995), 154. 102 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency

15. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” October 28 (1984): 125–133. 16. Perhaps in an effort to call attention to the difference between the Mexican actors and the character that Heston played, Welles cast a Mexican actor whose name was Vargas to play the biker who expressed an erotic interest in Susan on the streets of Los Robles. On the larger question of the relationship between the social construction of Chicano/a identities and Welles’s cinematic representations and the casting of Chicanos and Mexicans, see William Anthony Nericcio’s “Of Mestizos and Half-Breeds: Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil,” in Chon A. Noriega, Chicanos and Film: Representations and Resistance (Minneappolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 183–184. 17. See Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir” in Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), 53–64, for an explanation of the relationship between the noir gaze and the cold war state’s surveillance apparatus. 18. Andre Bazin has proposed a reading of Hank Quinlan’s character that explicitly links him with the politics of the exception in Orson Welles: A Critical View (Los Angeles: Acrobat Books, 1991).

Quinlan is not really the crooked cop. He doesn’t make anything out of his investigations.

He is convinced of the guilt of the people he gets convicted on false evidence. Without him,

therefore, the guilty would pass for innocent. . . . Quinlan is physically monstrous, but is he

morally monstrous as well? The answer is yes and no. Yes, because he is guilty of a crime to

defend himself; no, because from a higher moral standpoint, he is, at least in certain

respects, above the honest, just, intelligent Vargas, who will always lack that sense of life

which I shall call Shakespearean. These exceptional beings should not be judged by ordi-

nary laws. (124)

19. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 24. The exception the state produces to engender the limits to the rule of democratic governance might also be understood to embody the rule that has produced the exception. As the limit internal to the national order but external to its conditions of belonging, the exception can consent to this non-position, or the exception can do what the “young Oriental” did and turn the limit into legal grounds for supplanting the entire order. 20. Etienne Balibar describes this moment of emergence in “The Nation-Form: History and Donald E. Pease ● 103

Ideology,” in Race, Class and Nation: Ambiguous identities, ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (New York: Verso, 1988) pp. 86–106. 21. For a cogent analysis of how this moment ﬁts into the long history of Chicano repres- sion, see Rodolfo Acuna, Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle to Liberation (San Antonio: Canﬁeld Press, 1974). 22. Nelson G. Copp provides a useful historical account of the relationship between Opera- tion Wetback and braceros labor disutes in Wetbacks and Braceros (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1971). Ernesto Galarza discusses the campaigns mounted in opposition to the state’s antidemocratic measures in Merchants of Labor: The Mexican Bracero Story (Charlotte: Mc Nelly and Loftin, 1964). 23. I have drawn these statistics from Jorge Bustamanta, “Undocumented Immigration from Mexico: Research Report” International Migration Review 2, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 149–177; and Arthur F. Corwin, “Mexican Emigration History, 1900–1970: Literature and Research” Latin American Research Review 8, no. 2 (Summer, 1973): 3–24. 24. See James Narremore, “The Trial: the F.B.I. vs. Orson Welles” Film Comment, January- February, 1991, pp.22–27. 25. D. A. Miller has argued that detective novels, in producing a distinction between their detection and space exempted from policing power, lull us into the belief that everyday life is free from surveillance. See The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). I would argue that the emergency powers that underwrite the citizen also underwrite and produce a mediation between what Michel Foucault has described as the irreducible distinction between the citizen’s understanding of the citizen’s rights as sovereign and the disciplinary society in which those rights would be exercised. Foucault explains that from the nineteenth century to our own day, civil society

has been characterized on the one hand, by a legislation, a discourse, an organization based

on public right, whose principle of articulation is the social body and the delegative status

of each citizen; and on the other hand by a closely lined grid of disciplinary coercions

whose purpose is in fact to assure the coherence of this same social body. Hence these two

limits, a right of sovereignty and a mechanism of discipline which deﬁne, I believe, the

arena in which power is exercised. But these two limits are so heterogeneous that they can-

not possibly be reduced to each other.... The powers of modern society are exercised

through, on the basis of, and by virtue of, this very heterogeneity between a public right of 104 ● Borderline Justice / States of Emergency

sovereignty and a polymorphous disciplinary mechanism. The disciplines may well be the

carriers of a discourse that speaks of a rule, but this is not the juridical rule deriving from

sovereignty, but a natural rule, a norm. The code they come to deﬁne is not that of law but

that of normalisation.

See Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 107. 26. Sylvia Wynter has described the visual dominance Susan exercises in this scene as a version of what she calls the “Miranda complex.” “The relationship of the dominance of Miranda (although female) over Caliban (although male),”Wynter explains, “results from the objectiﬁcation of Caliban (whose racialized otherness is represented in his physiognomic, read monstrous, difference) as lacking the rationality which Miranda is now represented as alone capable of exercising.” Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman,’” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Wokmen and Literature, ed. Carol Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (New Jersey: Africa World Press, Inc., 1990), 355–72. 27. “Fantasy conceals the fact that the Other, the symbolic order, is structured around some traumatic impossibility, around something which cannot be symbolized—i.e., the real of jouissance: through fantasy jouissance is domesticated.” Slavoj Ziziek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 123. 28. See Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir” in Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), 53, for an explanation of the relationship between the noir gaze and the cold war state’s surveillance apparatus. 29. In “Noir Wagner” Elizabeth Bronfen argues that it castrates her by subjecting her to a “stake in a game of masculine bonds of honor, rivalry, jealousy, and camaraderie that utterly crosses out any agency of her own.” Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl, (Durham: Duke University Press: 2000), 197. 30. For a brilliant reading of the ways in which private enjoyment can destroy a network of symbolic relations, see Joan Copjec. “The Phenomenal/ Nonphenomenal” in Joan Copjec, Shades of Noir, (London: Verso, 1993). In “Film Noir and Women” Elizabeth Cowie argues that femme fatale “is simply a catch phrase for the dangers of sexual difference and the demands and risks that desire poses for the man. The male hero know- ingly submits himself to the ‘spider woman’ . . . for it is precisely her dangerous sexuality Donald E. Pease ● 105 that he desires, so that it is ultimately his own perverse desire, that is his downfall.” Shades of Noir, (London: Verso, 1993), 125. Foster Hirsch, Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen (San Diego: A. S. Barnes, 1981). Janey Place, “Women in Film Noir,” in E. Ann Kaplan, ed. Women and Film Noir (London: British Film Institute, 1978).